6 Ways to Improve Web Page Speed

As per the Google algorithm, page speed happens to be a significant ranking factor. This implies that even the slightest delay in page load time can adversely affect your website. Moreover, a vast majority of users tend to abandon a webpage and move to another one if it takes more than expected time to load.

It is important to realize that every one second of site speed improvement can double the conversion. It will further lead to an increase in revenue. Therefore, it’s extremely important to optimize the web page speed if you don’t want to lose customers. Best SEO services in India can help you do that. Here, have a look at some of the factors that can greatly impact your web page speed.

Use Content Delivery Network

A CDN also known as Content Delivery System is a network of geographically located servers. It works by hosting your files to a host of servers distributed all over the world as a result of which the load speed will be equally distributed across different servers. Using a CDN will make sure that content from your webpage reaches people in a fast and swift manner based on their geographical location. It will further save bandwidth, increase page speed and improve user engagement.

Install a caching plugin

Caching is important as it helps your website or webpage run faster by reducing the load on hosting servers. So irrespective of which hosting server you are using, installing a cache plugin will help improve your webpage speed. Plugins like WP Total Cache or WP Super Cache are great for WordPress. If, however, you are using WP Engine it comes with a built-in caching so you don’t have to install a separate plugin for the same.

Once you have installed a cache plugin, the next step is to add Expires Headers. You can add Expires Header either manually or install a plugin to do the same. Expire Headers help improve the website speed in two ways. First of all Expires Headers make sure that users don’t have to download the same page twice. Secondly, it helps speed up the website by reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Optimize your images

Image optimization is another step that will help increase the load speed of your web page. Image optimization involves several steps such as uploading images in the right format, using browser caches and compressing images etc. There are various easy to use plug-ins available for compressing the images. For instance, if you are using WordPress, installing WP Smush.it plug-in will help you to automatically compress your images. This plug-in is wonderful in the sense that it will reduce the size of the images without the image losing any of its visual quality. Moreover, this plugin works in the background every time you upload a new image thus making it easier for you to compress images.

Reduce your redirects

While having redirects are way better than broken links, having too many of them is never good as it increases the time taken by the browser to reach the correct version of the page thus increasing the load speed. There are a number of effective tools which you can use to spot redirects on your website. Once you have them try to get rid of as many of them as possible.

Minify your CSS and JS files

Minifying and compressing files is another step you should take in order to increase the speed of your web page. Minify usually refers to removing unnecessary elements from the source code such as white spaces, comments, line breaks etc. Removing these unwanted characters will definitely improve web page speed and performance.

One major drawback of various content management system such as WordPress is that a new JS or CSS file is added every time you install a new plugin. This causes your web page to slow down. In order to up your webpage’s speed, you should try minifying the files. This can be done in a number of different ways. You can try to reduce the file size by minifying them before you get them ready to load on your server or you can choose to delete all the unnecessary characters from the source codes. There are various plug-ins available to help you in the process.

Summing up

Fixing a web page’s speed is more important than ever before. Recently mobile devices are taking over desktop usage. So if your web page is not fast enough you will end up losing a whole chunk of the audience. Moreover, given the huge dependence on the internet for everything users have become less patient and want information in a fast and efficient manner. Therefore, it is extremely important to increase the speed of your web page.